The designer of a wire stripper machine for metal reclamation is conventionally faced with 2 major technical requirements: driving an insulated wire through the machine and making a cut on the wire insulation. The two main means of guiding the driving of a wire are an adjustable one-hole (one-hole-fits-all) guide and a nonadjustable hole, or minimally adjustable multiple-hole guide means. Either means may apply to single-entrance wire strippers and multiple-entrance wire strippers.
An adjustable, one-hole stripper machine must be able to fit wires ranging from a very small diameter to a very large diameter. Its wire drive wheel must also have good contact with the wire in order to provide sufficient traction and to fix the wire at a desirable location. With the blade at an appropriate height, a continuous longitudinal cut can be made as the wire is driven through the stripper machine.
Many techniques have been tried in the prior art to keep the wire at the center of a cutting blade. Some examples are an input plate which restrains the wire at a distance from the blade and an input tube which inserts into the hole on the input plate and restrains the wire at a closer distance from the cutting blade. Whichever technique is used, it is critical to accurately retain the insulated wire at the center of the cutting blade during the entire stripping process.
There are also less common strippers that sit in between the aforementioned stripper machine types. Although it drives wire better, a multiple-hole type wire stripper requires multiple blades which leads to higher cost, size, and weight. None of the prior art solutions can offer satisfactory results because they don't offer restrictions at the critical plane perpendicular to the blade where wire escape takes place. Therefore, there has been a long felt need in the market for a multiple-hole stripper machine with a single cutting blade.